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A think a governing body solves the wrong problem. Most of the ethical issues that have arisen around data science in particular are actually competency issues.
by schaunwheeler 9y ago
A think a governing body solves the wrong problem. Most of the ethical issues that have arisen around data science in particular are actually competency issues. It's not that someone deliberately set out to target already-vulnerable populations. It's that they designed systems without building in checks for unintended consequences. A governing body accomplishes what any legal framework accomplishes: it provides instruction and incentives to limit liability. A legal framework is different than an ethical framework. What we need is an ethical framework.
The original Hippocratic Oath did a fairly good job of this by stipulating ways that a doctor could prove his competence. Doctors who adhered to the oath weren't better doctors because they had some kind of internal moral compass or external adjudicating body. They were better doctors because only the doctors who had competency to spare were willing to make the sacrifices that adherence to the oath required.
https://hackernoon.com/on-the-difficulty-of-creating-a-data-science-code-of-ethics-9ab44f71af52 https://hackernoon.com/on-the-difficulty-of-creating-a-data-...
Ethical problems get solved (as much as that type of problem can ever really be "solved") by individual practitioners refusing to work with other individual practitioners who refuse to adhere to some basic best practices. That creates a network of competent and trustworthy individuals, who are still totally fallible, but who put their own practice up toe constant public scrutiny.
Ethical problems are problems of systemic risk. Systemic risk doesn't get solved through organizations.
- s73v3r_ 9y agoThe governing body would not just be there to arbitrate, advocate, or negotiate. They would also be there for promoting training and sharing of knowledge.
- mr_spothawk 9y agoi want to stress that i'm not challenging the person, just the text. > The governing body would not just be there to arbitrate, advocate, or negotiate. They would also be there for promoting training and sharing of knowledge. this reads like duct-tape solutions. it's always the case that a governing body grows and grows and gets in the way. "it's not just there to XYZ, it also BLAHBLAHBLAH". a governing body is one possible solution to the problem of people not understanding ethics (or how to figure out what ethics are), that I don't think will solve the larger problem. a governing body will need to be run by practitioners of governance, and enforced by practitioners of enforcement. ethics needs to be practiced everywhere, all the time. and a governing body won't make that happen. people need to be learning about why their activities are "good" or "bad" or "questionable". in my (simplified version) view: we're not lacking incentive to work (money!), we're lacking incentive to not work (people shouting at us for being assholes for doing asshole work [e.g. bombs, baby killing, evil algos]). we need to cultivate behaviors of ethical culture... instead we're cultivating behaviors that promote short-term-ism (buy your way to happiness, bomb your way to safety, build your dream home on loan!, opportunity cost services saving us from having to cleaning up after ourselves, trash removal services that vanish things away to faraway dumps we never think of)
- s73v3r_ 9y agoI honestly don't see what's "duct-tape" about suggesting that, being our organization, we'd get to decide how it's shaped.
- schaunwheeler 9y agoI don't think training and sharing of knowledge is the problem. The problem is creating an appropriate incentive structure for maintaining trust in individual practitioners' competency. That doesn't happen in a top-down way. It has to be negotiated as locally as possible.